If there is glare from the sky or light pollution from street lamps, porch lights or headlights, wear a billed hat.
As a measure of your change in wakefulness in nature, begin and end looking at the same plants or trees.
While visualizing the Mandala, or with it present in your peripheral vision, wait for the moment when the darkened and, therefore, invisible or dead looking, plants or trees are suddenly transformed into the outlines, depths and colors of living things. When this occurs, you may feel a surge of wakefulness tantamount to witnessing a birth, evidenced by becoming suddenly more erect, hands and arms going skyward and uttering “Wow!” This may happen more than once with the same plant or tree. When it no longer does, look for others which may have this effect.
You might never have experienced this before with a plant or tree (or stream, bird, animal or person) for several reasons:
The period over which transformation is available for any given plant or tree is only minutes.
Seeing a plant or tree going from dark to color and depth is like the surge of energy you have when you first meet someone. At this moment, like finding a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or love at first sight, you decide in seconds pretty much how it or he or she fits into your life. Unless you live and work on a farm, you probably weren’t available for such introductions, but rushing to work in the morning or rushing home again in the evening.
Anticipating the experience before it occurs enhances its occurrence, especially when motivated by a desire for healing or transformation.
The greatest comprehension of a plant or tree occurs as its dimensions and colors begin to emerge from darkness. After this in the morning, the increasing complexity of revelation of its colors within colors, shadings within shadings, textures within textures, shapes within shapes, etc., all of these within all the others, etc., may distract you from noticing it differentiating from objects outside itself.
About 7:45 pm, evening turns to night, colors and other dimensions of plants and trees become unnoticeably different from darkness, and this permits you to repeat steps 2, 3 & 4.
Your experience discovering people as they also transit from dark to dimensionality and color may be similar to that of plants and trees – rapturous – forming an authentic basis for “Good morning!” or Good evening!” Each morning nature is uniquely different from the day before and its mood fertile with seeds of new conversations with nature and man.
Procedures for Morning and Evening Communions with Nature